


excuse the mess

by inattention



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Family Dynamics, Fluff, Getting Together, Implied Sexual Content, Light Angst, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, side atsukitasuna
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:34:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25625998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inattention/pseuds/inattention
Summary: The boy is ten when his mother, exhausted from her nine to five and smelling of Tokyo’s late-night pollution, teaches him that eating a meal someone else has prepared is something akin to a love language.
Relationships: Miya Osamu/Sakusa Kiyoomi
Comments: 16
Kudos: 158
Collections: 🐶🍙 omigiri fanfic collection





	excuse the mess

**Author's Note:**

> hello ive been sitting on this for so so long and i cant believe i finally finished it today after a lot of cutting and crying and complaining to no one in particular
> 
> thank you to deanne who spent days listening to me whine about their dynamics and also to kuro, who had to deal with me barking today because i was on osaomi brainrot

The boy is ten when his mother, exhausted from her nine to five and smelling of Tokyo’s late-night pollution, teaches him that eating a meal someone else has prepared is something akin to a love language.

It happens like this: she comes home from work, exhaustion clear in the lines around her eyes, but when his siblings crowd her, nudging and twittering, she smiles bright all the same.

This is when the boy decides a furtive eye over her. Affection should make his mother amiable, he thinks, but it turns her incomprehensible instead. His father once told her that it was because she’s a woman unsuited for love, and while the boy did not understand what this meant, he understands the way his mother’s lips had tightened, the way she’d winced so strongly it was almost audible. He understands that it was a very bad thing to be.

He never says it outright, but he does sort of agree with his father. Whenever his mother smiles, it is always too soft for the harsh lines of her face. The sharpness of her jaw, the sunken valleys of her cheeks—all of these are things he shares with his siblings—but it is he who resembles her the most.

He thinks that this probably means he looks strange when he smiles, too. He is probably unsuited for love, too. He doesn’t want to be.

If his mother notices the beginnings of a complex, she does not show any indication of it; instead, she washes her hands instead and takes out the ingredients for tonight’s fried rice. Dressed in her office clothes, the lines of her elegant features made whole by the road blocks and speed bumps of a life well lived, his mother is unapproachable and unbearably adult like, but with her apron on and her hair pulled up, she is transformed into someone who loves him, and in that, there was no fear.

The boy understands that is there is always devotion in the effort put into something that’s for someone else’s consumption. There is always devotion in effort, _always_ —but his mother’s hands are calloused, labor clear in every line on her palms, and while there is so much more that he will piece together once he’s older, right now he thinks he understands the fundamentals.

When you cook for someone, there is always familiarity in the way your fingers handle ingredients that’s meant to be a homage for your loved ones, and there is intimacy in how you’ve chosen to reveal your intent. The boy never forgets it, how his mother spots his curious eyes and puts a finger to her lips as though sharing a secret.

The boy never could forget it, even as the days turned into months and the months into years, and now the boy is a man pushing his baggage into the trunk of his car because there are paths he cannot walk on if he chooses to stay in the gingerbread house of his childhood.

The man tells his mother to take care of herself and to always be safe and she tells him, in return, to not do drugs and to call home as often as he can.

He goes to university, and ends up sharing his dorm room with someone who leaves his bed unmade in the mornings and coerces him to watch telenovelas with him. He thinks about getting a pet and his roommate brings home a rock with googly eyes glued on it, instead.

(They name it Florence Nightingale.)

He takes a walk every morning at six. He doesn’t order anything when his acquaintances invite him out to eat. He buys cookbooks with easy recipes and cook his own meals and calls home every so often.

When he makes the league, his schedule changes but he is ever vigilant, ever conscious. He monitors his diet throughout the year. He doesn’t go to the gym for personal reasons, but he purchases a mat so he can practice yoga in the evenings. He consults with his coach, his doctor, and his therapist—always ever conscious, always ever vigilant. He never consumes anything the fans give him, instead choosing to quietly pawn them off to his teammates so the food doesn’t go to waste.

The man only keeps the things that he is sure of around. It’s how he’s always been.

**[ You ask me what love means to me and I don’t know how to tell you that it means whatever you put in a plate on our dining table. ]**

Kiyoomi turns the name _Miya Osamu_ over with his tongue for the first time as a first year, but it doesn’t taste like a person. Understandable. The Miya twins are more myth than people—Osamu’s is a name always meant to be spoken along with his brother’s. Even when it was accompanied by the remnants of a conqueror’s fire and ringing bells of a holy shrine, the syllables tasted of the ashes of an empire turned to dust instead of the gilded gold that should come with someone who holds a bloody scepter.

Similarly, Miya Osamu takes one look at him and decides that he is simply not hungry.

Still, Kiyoomi searches for him in the empty space beside his twin brother at Japan’s national youth camp and doesn’t find him there. _Miya Osamu_ crumbles and dissolves in his mouth.

Kiyoomi likes his thankless metaphors, so when he is asked about it (and it’s not very often that he is), he tells them that planets fall out of orbit and rearrange themselves all the time. There is more to come, but it will have to wait until the sun has set a thousand more times.

In the meantime, Miya Osamu will abandon his jersey for an apron, Kiyoomi will continue to do all he can to play volleyball for the meantime.

*

Miya Osamu is someone he knows only by the sound of his shoes squeaking on linoleum and the way his eyes, hooded and sluggish, flit between things lazily, similar to a predator’s quiet observation of its next meal.

But he does not look at Kiyoomi. Not once. This surprises him not because of vanity, but because he is tall for his age and the Itachiyama uniform isn’t exactly inconspicuous.

Despite this, when they play, he thinks he can understand him. _Here_ , he announces, _behold the test subject_ —Miya Osamu, and his many definitions, all the little idiosyncrasies wrought from his playing style.

At sixteen, he is his brother as much as he is himself, two monster blurs moving in tandem; at seventeen, he is frustrated and restless, every muscle in his body straining to hit his brother’s tosses; at eighteen, he plays deliberately, every movement calculated and intentional. His eyes are starving now.

He still does not look at Kiyoomi. Not once.

In the last game they play together, he remembers the seconds ticking as a ball is sent his way. Osamu licks his lips, and then he’s serving.

Kiyoomi is moving to receive it before he can even understand it, spurred on by this boy who doesn’t look like he wants to be here any longer than he should but wants so desperately to win. Miya Osamu only keeps his eyes at him long enough to note how the ball lands right beside him with a satisfying smack, and then he’s turning away to high five his brother, _Miya 11_ emblazoned on his back.

It is the first time he looks at Kiyoomi. He does not look again for a very long time.

*

Self-restraint is a song he’s memorized all the chords to, so when their coach tells them to start watching their diets in preparation for game season, he just nods and goes along with it. It’s the same procedure: no alcohol, more carbohydrates and protein. Get enough sleep. Hydrate. Don’t let yourself get provoked by Komori shit talking you over text.

Miya makes a face and starts to complain—this, unfortunately, is procedure, too. It’s only been seven months since he’d made the team, but there’s an itemized storage space in his head filled with Miya Atsumu’s many grievances, which should not be there. At all.

It’s not a modest list, either, because Atsumu complains a great deal about a great many things—from not being able to drink any more beer to how his hair might be falling off (and it is). Today, Kiyoomi tells him off with a well-worded “no one cares.”

Instead of firing back with a smartass quip like Miya’s known to do, like Kiyoomi’s been counting on him to do, he only furrows his eyebrows and tells him, “Ya really need to get laid.”

“Excuse me?” Kiyoomi levels him with glare that would’ve made a weaker man keel over vomiting, but Miya only looks back at him, expectant.

He’s been a recurring affliction lately. Ever since he changed his relationship status on Facebook, he’s now of the opinion that he’s qualified enough to bestow everyone with his unsolicited romance advice. The team’s played the part of an unwilling congregation quite well, sometimes even going as far as humoring him when he goes on his dreaded homilies about the foundations of good relationships even when EPJ Raijin’s Suna Rintarou came by in person to tell them not to.

He continues, “Come on, ya gotta admit it. Yer in dire need of some loosenin’ up.”

“That’s not for you to decide.” He is irritated and petty enough to imagine poking him in the eye. He doesn’t do it, of course, even when he comes pretty damn close, and packs up instead.

“Where are ya goin’, Omi-kun?” Miya demands when he starts to walk away. “Come back here and face me like a man!”

He doesn’t even turn around.

He goes to the supermarket a few blocks away from his apartment every couple of weeks to restock on his necessities. After he scrubs off the grime from practice, he ventures outside with a surgical mask and a cap, a newly concocted meal plan burned to the back of his eyelids. Chicken breast, he thinks. It’s always chicken breast for a few weeks with beans and potatoes.

The grocery section is cold and bright. He disinfects the handles of his shopping basket before touching it—ever conscious, ever vigilant. Chicken breast, he thinks again. Beans. Potatoes. Green peppers. Cabbage. Eggs.

“Sakusa?”

He looks up from where he was inspecting a tomato for bruises, and is suddenly being looked at in a way he’s never been by a person who never felt the need to do so. Without the black uniform straining against his broad shoulders and hair so dark it looks like ink, spilling across his forehead now that he wasn’t donning the standard restaurant regulation hairnet and cap, Miya Osamu almost looks like the muse of a Renaissance painting come alive to torment its artist.

It’s one thing to be victimized by the Miya family genes at sixteen with a net barricading him from any bad decisions, but it’s a completely different thing altogether to manage to do it twice. Komori would bust a lung laughing if he’d somehow managed to find out that Osamu accomplished blindsiding him both on the court on their last game and then on the vegetable aisle of a Tokyo supermarket five years since he’s last saw him in person.

“Miya,” he says, and then realizes it sounds wrong, calling him a name that he associates with acid and shameless hickeys and a whole lot of scorn, “uh.”

Thankfully, Osamu seems to pick up on it and waves a calloused hand. “Just call me by my first name, I don’t really care.”

“Then, Osamu-san,” he tells him, not one to be phased. The person in question nods in acknowledgement as he picks up a couple of tomatoes and adds it to his cart—already filled with an assortment of vegetables and cooking implements.

“Been a while since I last saw ya in person,” Osamu brings up conversationally as he pushes his cart beside him, “’course I knew ya were in the same team as my brother, but it’s crazy just how long I’ve only been hearin’ of ya. What’re ya up to?”

“Groceries,” he replies. Osamu takes a glance at his basket and makes a face like he understands. Kiyoomi thinks he does—once upon a time, the Miya twins were more legend than real, tangible beings. Maybe in another world, he’d be right beside him. Maybe in another world, he’d be playing volleyball too, sneakers squeaking against wood, tape wound around his fingers.

In this world though, Kiyoomi could reach out and touch him. If he wanted to. He didn’t, but he could.

Osamu only whistles knowingly. “Chicken breast, huh? It’s that time of the year again, I see.”

He nods.

“Should I be expectin’ Tsumu to come home whinin’ again?”

Kiyoomi quirks a sardonic smile. “He will be,” he attests, because he’d already started when he left him to stew in his problems earlier. He counts his inhales and exhales. One, two, three. Osamu looks up from where he was glaring at the ingredients list of a spaghetti sauce packet, and Kiyoomi asks, “Why are you in Tokyo?”

“Ah, m’talkin’ to someone about startin’ an Onigiri Miya branch here. It’s ‘bout time, ‘nyways, and m’stayin’ with Tsumu ‘till everythin’s gotten settled.” Osamu leans toward him and Kiyoomi stiffens, expecting touch, but he was apparently only reaching over to pick up a packet of sesame seeds. “Oh, sorry. ‘Scuse me.”

“It’s fine,” he says, following his every movement. He doesn’t know him very well, if at all. He knows his spikes and his serves and even that he doesn’t recall. Osamu is casual, and very mild, and he _looks_ at him now. He never used to do that in high school.

They say their goodbyes once their paths get separated by the aisles—Osamu has a whole array of things he wants, it seems. He sheepishly admits that now that he’s living in Atsumu’s guest room for the time being he’s been swiping his credit card to pay for a lot of things—ranging from groceries to a Sasuke body pillow.

“The salary of a someone from the V-League is really no joke,” he smirks, holding between his index and middle fingers a card with the golden letters of his brother’s name on it as his shoulders rest on the handles of his shopping cart. “’Sides, my food is great, so really he’s just payin’ me for my labor.”

Kiyoomi remembers shoes and sweat and the screaming of fans who came to watch them play— _you were as good as your brother._ Kiyoomi remembers cold eyes and a click of the tongue and the existence of a boy who in another life could’ve been wearing the same black and gold of the Black Jackals. He does not understand leaving, but Osamu is looking straight at him now and _smiling_ —bright in a way he never was in all the three years Kiyoomi thought he’s picked him apart enough to know him, standing from opposite sides of the net.

 _Ah_ , he thinks. _He left and became happier for it._

“Y’should come by the shop once it’s finished.” Osamu tells him politely. Equally polite, Kiyoomi accepts.

He doesn’t expect the text that comes later that evening from an unknown number telling him to remember his promise. He doesn’t expect to reply to it with a _I plan to,_ either.

*

_How to prepare boneless chicken breast_ —brought to you by a flustered Sakusa Kiyoomi and Komori, who’d paid an unexpected visit and was now, as predicted, losing a lung laughing. What he’s doing right now is less preparing and more avoiding Komori’s taunts with heavy handed deflection, but it’s nothing he wasn’t used to.

“No,” he cackles, “no, you’re not _serious_.”

“Unfortunately,” he winces, rolling the chicken on the no-grease paper. “I am.”

His cousin always thought Kiyoomi’s crushes were amusing. “How long will this one last?”

There’s only been a few people throughout the years (and with each one, Komori always found a way to be an asshole). Iizuna Tsukasa was the taste of mashed potatoes, comforting and patient. Hinata Shouyou was key lime cheesecake melting on his tongue—tangy and sweet and something he couldn’t take in high doses. Wakatoshi-kun was the worst, because his name prompted songs in his mouth—from pop to jazz, all of them reminding him of a boy in middle school struck stupid by a folded handkerchief and a left hand serve that he couldn’t dig.

“I don’t know,” he says, pulling out a pan and a bottle of vegetable oil. He remembers gray hair and gray lips and gray dreams. Now the ashes have been lit on fire and the smoke is overwhelming.

Komori shudders. “Have mercy. There is only so much homoerotic subtext that I can take with a straight face.”

Kiyoomi doesn’t say anything more, instead deciding to turn on the stove and pouring some oil into a tablespoon. There will be time for him to stew over his choices later, but right now he has chicken to fry and a cousin to feed. Freeloader.

*

Osamu throws a wrench into his plans when he texts him one day with the request to facetime. It’s a strange request, but when he asks, it feels like nothing. Apparently, he’s going stir crazy in Atsumu’s apartment and _when Rin is with my brother, he’s unbearable._ He doesn’t particularly want to do it, but it’s not as if he has better things to do, so they set a time.

He is greeted by the view of Osamu’s face zoomed in the camera as he presumably struggles to adjust his phone’s camera. When he steps back, finally satisfied with the angle, he’s standing in the kitchen of what has to be Atsumu’s apartment, judging from the takeout menu taped on the refrigerator along with several neon post it notes of when he’s supposed to pick up his laundry. “Hi,” he greets him mildly, like Kiyoomi hadn’t just gotten acquainted with his left nostril a few seconds ago.

“Hello,” Sakusa replies.

“M’gonna cook dinner while I talk to ya. Is that alright?” When Kiyoomi nods, Osamu starts to pull out the pots and pans with a meticulousness that people reserve for things they care about. “Didja eat already?” he asks, looking back at him.

“Yes,” he replies, honest. He’s never missed a meal.

“Oh man, y’should come over one day for dinner. Tsumu would pitch a fit.”

“I can’t promise you anything,” he tells him right off the bat. “I only eat meals I’m sure of.”

Osamu looks at him, tilting his head as though deep in thought. Kiyoomi waits for the questions. They’re all things he’s been asked before, but he still has—

“Hm,” is all Osamu has to say to that. “Fair enough. Y’should take care of what ya put in yer body.”

He starts to cook, throwing in a few comments here and there, and Kiyoomi watches. There, he sees it—care and attention and diligence in every motion of his knife, in every patient little movement. He asks him mundane questions— _how is practice? do you have a favorite onigiri filling? why’d ya wear those highlighter lookin’ shoes in high school?_ He responds like he should— _good, umeboshi,_ and _shut the fuck up._

It’s five thirty when Kiyoomi tells him he should get started on his own dinner, and Osamu asks, with sauce on the side on his lips, “Will I be seein’ ya again?”

Kiyoomi thinks that this does not really sound like a goodbye. It sounds more like—

“Your brother is in my team. We don’t really have a choice,” he tells him, blunt. _A prelude,_ he thinks. _I’ll be seeing you again. I’m sure of it._

Osamu chuckles, looking giddy. “S’ppose not,” he says, “ya better be at the next Onigiri Miya opening, kiddo.”

*

It takes some time, but when Onigiri Miya is finished, Kiyoomi does indeed get an invitation—along with everyone else in the professional volleyball circuit, it seems, but details, details. It’s crowded tonight, but Kiyoomi stays away enough from the chaos itself that he can enjoy being around them. He stays on the counter with his thermos of hibiscus tea—sour, just how he likes it, and nods at everyone who greets him.

Miya brings his boyfriends, because of course he did. There’s Kita-san, the muscular farmer with the kindly eyes who was frankly so far out of Miya’s league that it impresses Kiyoomi a little to see them together, and Suna-san, the middle blocker from Komori’s team that Miya had hooked up with first. He keeps a possessive arm around the former’s waist and a hand on the latter’s ass, so it’s been a pretty awkward moment for all involved—and by all, he truly means himself, because apparently everyone else is way too used to how Atsumu is to even call him out about it anymore.

Miya Osamu, wearing the all black Onigiri Miya uniform and cap, comes out of the kitchen and directs his employees to the tables, laughing at something one of the employees said. When he turns his head and catches Kiyoomi’s eye, he smiles. “Hey, you.”

“Hello.”

Osamu digs out a bottle of hand sanitizer from his pocket and slides it across the counter.

Kiyoomi looks at it, and then looks at Osamu, who is already on his way back to the kitchen to take care of the influx of orders.

It’s nothing special. Osamu does things like this from time to time to thank the team for looking after his hurricane of a brother. A chicken _katsu onigirazu_ delivered straight to Hinata’s hands after a game, a gift basket for Meian, _ichigo daifuku_ for Bokuto and his fiancé, a bottle of disinfectant for Kiyoomi because he doesn’t accept edibles.

He takes a deep breath. _It’s nothing special,_ he thinks again. Miya apparently thinks differently.

“Are ya fallin’ in love with my brother?” he is suddenly leaning forward to ask, dark eyes blown wide with mischievous shock. Kiyoomi doesn’t look up from where he was rubbing down the bottle with a wipe. “Omi-kun, y’have really bad taste.”

“Stay out of my business,” Kiyoomi tells him tightly.

“Come on. My _brother_ , Omi-kun?” He makes a gagging noise as he occupies the seat next to Kiyoomi. “I knew ya had a thing fer my face. I knew it.”

“I know you like to think you’re all that now that you’ve landed two boyfriends, but I attribute that more to your luck than your actual positive qualities.”

“Someone’s touchy,” Miya chuckles. It’s unfamiliar—how easily he concedes, the lines of his mouth already blunted down from cruel to cauterized, like love has melted him down and turned him somewhat eligible to be seen in the public eye. It makes Kiyoomi’s mouth curl up from behind his mask—he wonders if Osamu looks like that when he’s bathed in devotion, too.

“Do you think I’d fall for anyone who’s capable of adhering to proper cleanliness?”

Miya opens his mouth to say something, but he’s whacked upside the head by his brother, who frowns at him.

“Are you botherin’ Sakusa again?” Osamu demands, raising an eyebrow.

“How’s it any of yer business if I am?”

“M’tired of always apologizin’ to people fer yer sake.” Osamu scowls. “It’s gettin’ annoyin’.”

“It’s ‘cause ya frown so much that yer gettin’ wrinkles,” Atsumu replies, poking in the creases between his eyebrows. “But if ya like Omi-kun that much, then he’s all yers.”

He disappears in a flash, leaving them alone together. Miya Osamu lets out a whoosh of air and turns to him, an apology written on his pursed lips. “M’sorry ‘bout him,” he tells him with a wince.

“I think it’s pointless to apologize for your brother,” Kiyoomi says, clinical, eyes on the label on the bottle. _Lemon scented,_ it says. _Kills ninety nine point nine percent of germs._ “He’s not you.”

Osamu stares at him, considering. There’s always been depth and tremor to him, whilst Atsumu was storm and motion.

Kiyoomi does not understand intimacy—has never cared enough to, frankly—but he understands _this_.

“No,” he agrees slowly, his lips stretching into a small, satisfied smile, “he isn’t.”

*

Kiyoomi has always known his parents weren’t happy. It was not something you could ignore growing up—when instead of holding hands and inside jokes, your parents communicated maybe once or twice a week. His oldest sister swears that they loved each other, once: there’s a vague memory of laughter and sunlit excursions to the park and two hands in her little chubby ones, but that was before the piles of bills and the overtime and the illusion of neglect, coiling tight and hot around their necks until it strangled them. By the time Kiyoomi was old enough to understand, they had stopped talking completely. This is when he first begins putting away his mirth away for later, so they don’t make the corners of his stone lips pull up. When prompted to explain, he will say it is an aftereffect of his prudence, even when it is truly a half-hearted search for perfection.

The thing is—Kiyoomi knows that they’re both good people. They just didn’t love each other anymore but had far too much to lose. There was no happiness there, not anymore, so Kiyoomi thanks the gods every day that they let him find his.

That’s when he realizes that if his happiness resided in every corner of this linoleum court, Osamu’s was—

It was—

In the box is sent to his address, with the words Onigiri Miya on it and the label _umeboshi onigiri_ and the scribbled note saying _ya don’t have to eat it if you don’t wanna._ It’s unmarked. He already knows who it’s from.

He is ten when his mother tells him with the whisper on the edge of her lips and the mischief in her eyes, so alike his own, that eating food that someone else cooked for you is the surest way to acknowledge their devotion. There is trust there—enough for you to let something someone else has touched inside of you—close to where you breathe, to where your heart beats.

Sakusa Kiyoomi is twenty-three now and so far away from his mother, playing in a court where the world can see him, but he still can’t find it in himself to forget how he took a bite out of the fried rice that evening and tasted his mother’s devotion instead.

When he bites down, he tastes liberation—Osamu, with the wind whipping through his hair, a boyish grin on his face; the sound of a busy kitchen during rush hour; the bittersweet nostalgia of knowing a toss that you trust indisputably.

He chews and swallows. He takes another bite.

*

  
Kiyoomi has never truly understood affection. Maybe he really was unsuited for love. But lust—

That, at least, he can understand.

 _Consume me, consume me,_ he wants to find the words to say it. Except he doesn’t, and Osamu doesn’t make a move, but they both know.

It’s simmering under their skin. Kiyoomi can probably reach out and find its epicenter, reach out and take Osamu’s heart in his hands—a cavernous nasty organ with enough space for Kiyoomi to slide into, snug and cozy.

“Where will you be this weekend?”

Osamu’s eyes are steady. Unshakable. “I’ll be here.”

Kiyoomi dislikes difficult conversations. He likes it when things go easy, and he doesn’t have the patience for anything that’s not necessary. Osamu doesn’t want him to get more than that.

So, when he comes into Onigiri Miya just a mere thirty minutes before they close, the rest of the team noticeably absent, they both know what he’s here for. He takes a seat by the counter as Osamu finishes wiping down the tables.

“I want to kiss you.”

Osamu stops in his wiping to look at him, the honey and gold in his irises reflected by the LED lighting. “Do ya?”

“Yes,” he says, and then, because he’s already slightly drunk and there’s else left to lose, “there’s a great deal of things I want to do to you and for you to do to me, but they’re all things I shouldn’t be saying in public and this is embarrassing enough already.”

Osamu tilts his head at him. “Why me?”

“I know you. I _trust_ you. It’s easier.” Kiyoomi folds his hands neatly on his lap. “One-night stands aren’t something I do usually, but if you prefer it that way, that’s fine. But I would like this to be a regular thing.” He chews on the inside of his cheek. “That’s all, as of this moment.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. The silence hangs as Osamu finishes drying his cups. “Is there anythin’ else?”

I like you. I like you so much that I don’t understand it. “No,” he says, “but I have a request.”

“What is it?”

He tells Osamu, “Kiss me,” and he obeys, steady and warm as a stream.

He is not a storm. He is the tide, returning and returning and returning. Kiyoomi finds himself getting pulled under.

*

So this is how Kiyoomi understands lust—

Osamu, shirtless, in the pale yellow light of the moon filtering through his blinds, his fingers drawing out hymns that Kiyoomi wasn’t even sure he could chant, his tongue a pleading confessional urging Kiyoomi to utter obscenities and truths he didn’t know he had hidden. Osamu, careful, sweet, patient—his lips on his, his hands interlocked with his, asking, asking, asking, always, “are you sure yer okay with this?”

Kiyoomi has never been surer; he doesn’t know how to say it, so he pulls him in into everything that he is instead.

That is lust to Kiyoomi. When he wakes up and sees Osamu still asleep beside him, light playing on his skin, he thinks _maybe this is what love is to me, too._

The morning after is nothing like the movies. For one, they’re in the spare room of Atsumu’s apartment, and that just means—

“ _Samu_! Samu, why the hell is the door locked?”

Kiyoomi escapes through the window, which is something he never thought he’d ever be doing in his life, but Osamu is throwing him his clothes and trying to slip into his own and it’s almost funny if it wasn’t so nerve wracking.

“Am I gonna see ya again?” he asks him once Kiyoomi is climbing down the pipe like a modern day Romeo.

Kiyoomi looks back at him again. Osamu’s smiling, like he already knows the answer. “We don’t really have a choice, do we?”

“No,” he agrees, “I guess we don’t.”

*

Kiyoomi finds himself in Osamu’s apartment more and more often—one he’s rented for convenience now that he was running a Tokyo branch. He’s become so familiar with Kiyoomi that he makes tall tales about the birthmark he’s always had on the side of his stomach—he tells about the past lives he thinks he could’ve had: a writer, risking it all for the love of his life; a soldier, giving his all for his country; a child playing too near the hunting grounds.

But in none of those made up past lives did he mention his own involvement, and now, looking at his naked back, littered with scratches, as he makes them both their breakfasts, he wonders if that was for better or for worse. He sets down the plates. The glasses, filled with orange juice. He takes Kiyoomi’s hand and brushes his lips against the knuckles.

“What are you doing?” he scrunches his nose.

“Nothin’. Here’s your breakfast, doll face.”

“I don’t love you,” Kiyoomi tells him.

“Okay,” Osamu shrugs, settling in the seat across him. It feels ridiculous, telling a man he’s made into his home that he doesn’t love him. _I could learn how to, though,_ he doesn’t tell him. He doesn’t need to. Osamu already seems to understand.

Love changes people. He sees it in his teammates. With Kita, Atsumu is pliant and sweet. With Suna he is a bitch.

In another life, it could’ve easily been someone else beside Osamu. In this life, Kiyoomi despises even the notion.

“So,” _show me everything you can’t tell me yet,_ Osamu doesn’t say, even though Kiyoomi knows he badly wants to. “Why aren’t we dating yet?”

Kiyoomi looks away. “Do you want to stop?”

“That’s not what I’m askin’.” Osamu says. Kiyoomi expects anger, rage, irritation. But there’s only soft, soft smiles, and endless patience. “Do you not like me?”

 _I want to hold you dearly, but I can’t figure out how._ So he takes out his pinky and interlocks it with Osamu's and he tries his very best to smile, even if it must look very strange. But Osamu looks at him like he’s finally seen someone worth seeing, and Kiyoomi can’t say the words but he knows Osamu understands when he looks at their intertwined pinkies.

“There’s no use making it more complicated than it has to be,” Kiyoomi says.

Osamu laughs but it’s fond. “Says you,” and his smile is warm, and Kiyoomi kisses him and all is right in the world.

**[ There are pieces to your smile that I want to be able to keep in a pouch and take wherever I go, and I know I won’t have to ask because you’d let me. ]**


End file.
